> there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.

You're optimising for quality, where as companies optimise for some balance of quality and cost.

AI might not be quite as good as a skilled human, but it's often good enough and a lot cheaper, so companies use it.

I actually think customer service is one of the few places it makes sense to use AI – at least to some degree. AI can provide immediate support to customer queries, and can usually handle the majority of basic issues customers have. You might need to escalate to a human in edge cases, but that's how you balance quality and cost.